CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 31, 2 (2008): 459‐490
PARENTS’ RESPONSES TO
MULTICULTURALISM: A STUDY OF ONE SCHOOL
Cynthia Levine‐Rasky Queen’s University
Since its founding in 1941 until the 1980s, “Pinecrest” School was dominated by child‐
ren from “Baywoods,” an economically privileged and largely Jewish neighbourhood.
In the late 1980s, the population of the school changed to include children of immigrants in an adjacent neighbourhood, “Kerrydale.” Seeking to protect their children’s cultural capital and class advantages, the Baywoods parents’ response involved the construction of fundamental difference and concerns about effects on school quality. The responses were interrupted by dilemma and ambivalence. They are read through the intersections of middle‐class formation and whiteness in terms of three dimensions: practice, relationality, and maintenance.
Key words: Jews, immigrants, public school, parents, exclusion, social class, ethnicity
Depuis sa création en 1941 jusque dans les années 1990, l’école « Pinecrest » accueillait principalement des enfants de « Baywoods », un quartier habité par des familles à l’aise et surtout par des Juifs. À la fin des années 1980, la population de l’école a changé à la suite de l’intégration d’enfants d’immigrants provenant de « Kerrydale », un quartier voisin. Cherchant à protéger le capital culturel de leurs enfants et les avantages de leur classe sociale, les parents de Baywoods ont réagi en invoquant la notion de différence fondamentale et en se préoccupant des effets possibles sur la qualité de l’école. Dilemmes et ambivalence ont toutefois interrompu le processus.
Les réactions des parents sont interprétées dans le contexte du lien entre la formation de la classe moyenne et la blancheur et ce, à trois niveaux : la pratique, les relations et le maintien de la reproduction du groupe.
Mots clés : Juifs, immigrants, école publique, parents, exclusion, classe sociale, ethnicité
______________________
Although not entirely a recent phenomenon in critical methods, “study‐
ing up” or what Leslie Roman (1993) describes as the examination of
“cultural practices, social relations, and material conditions that struc‐
ture the daily experiences and expectations of powerful groups” (p. 29) resonates with current directions in sociological research. Studies on loci of power embodied in whiteness, masculinity, and the middle class have generated much interest. The research project described in this article emerged from this approach. It primarily explores the perspectives of a group of parents in an urban neighbourhood I call “Baywoods” whose children attend “Pinecrest,” a public elementary school. These parents could be characterized as economically privileged if the phenomenon can be determined through income, residential property values, and professional and executive occupations. The participants are also iden‐
tifiably white (but their Jewishness may call for some qualification of that term), and most are women. Rather than illustrate a single dimension of studying up, my research project weaves two dimensions together, sug‐
gestive of an intersectional approach. I refer here to the term as described by Stasiulus (1999): “Intersectional theorizing understood the social real‐
ity of women and men, and the dynamics of their social, cultural, econ‐
omic, and political contexts to be multiply, simultaneously, and interactively determined by various significant axes of social organization” (p. 347, orig‐
inal emphasis). Yet Anthias (2005) distinguishes the fact of intersections in inequality from the processes by which inequality occurs. Specifically, she wants to separate “the notions of social position (concrete position vis‐á‐vis a range of social resources such as economic, cultural and pol‐
itical) and social positioning (how we articulate, understand, and interact with these positions, e.g., contesting, challenging, defining)” (p. 33). Thus the story here not only describes the particularities of a powerful group;
it also conveys something of the exercise of their power.
In the late 1980s, the population of the school changed to reflect the shape of immigrant settlement in its adjacent neighbourhood, “Kerry‐
dale.” Within the space of a few years, Pinecrest made a transition from monocultural to multicultural. How did Baywoods parents respond? My interviews revealed how they constructed fundamental differences bet‐
ween the groups of children. They also worried about effects on school quality as they sought to protect their children’s cultural capital and
class advantages. This process was not always smooth; it was inter‐
rupted by dilemma and ambivalence. I read the parents’ responses through the intersections of middle classness and whiteness in terms of three themes: practice, relationality, and maintenance in the face of perceived threats to the group’s reproduction. These themes are taken up below through the performance of middle‐class parenting1 in dilemma over social values and doing the right thing by one’s children. A Canadian study in a literature dominated (and inspired) by British sociology of education, this study fortifies understandings of the repro‐
duction of forms of exclusion in schools and in the communities that surround them.
BACKGROUND AND METHOD
Pinecrest is an elementary public school (kindergarten to grade 6) situ‐
ated in the heart of Baywoods, a neighbourhood located in a large Can‐
adian city. Approved by City Council in 1936, the municipal plan for Baywoods recommended lot sizes, street layout, and public services appropriate for a high‐class residential area.2 By the 1960s, the neigh‐
bourhood had become solidly Jewish; today, many of the stores on the commercial strip carry products for the Jewish market. From the school’s founding in 1941 until the late 1980s, the children at Pinecrest had a great deal in common: they were generally high socio‐economic status (SES) and Jewish.3 The demographic profile of the school changed along with immigration patterns in the city particularly affecting Kerrydale, an adjacent neighbourhood in the Pinecrest catchment area. Kerrydale consists of a large cluster of high‐rise apartment buildings. Among its residents are many new immigrants who reflect the diversity of Cana‐
dian immigration patterns. According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, in 2000, the city received 108,034 immigrants (including refu‐
gees). The rich diversity is revealed through the list of the top 10 source countries from which 60 per cent of all Canadian immigrants arrive:
China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Korea, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Jamaica (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2001). The other 40 per cent of immigrants come from over 100 different countries.
This migration predictably affects city schools. According to the district school board, at the time of this study (2000), 51 per cent of the students at Pinecrest spoke a primary language other than English and 28 per cent of students had lived in Canada for five years or fewer. In income, ethnicity, first‐language use, and duration of residency in Can‐
ada, therefore, the differences between the residents of Baywoods and Kerrydale were great.4 Table 1 illustrates these differences. For the Bay‐
woods parents, the contrast was significant. The homogeneity of Bay‐
woods defines the collective memory of some of the families there.
Remarkably, over half (13) of the participants as well as six of the non‐
interviewed partners spent their childhood in or near Baywoods. Three participants were living in the same houses in which they or their partners had grown up, making their children the third generation in the same house. Where Baywoods was homogeneous in most respects, Kerrydale was heterogeneous. The dominant ethnicity in Baywoods was Jewish (71%) while in Kerrydale, the largest groups were Southern European (19%) and Eastern European (19%). The rest were from coun‐
tries in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
Table 1
A Comparison of Baywoods and Kerrydale Based on Statistics Canada 2001 Census data (using PCensus for MapPoint)
Baywoods Kerrydale
Population 3,348 1,442
Canadian Citizenship 93% 64%
Immigrant Population 21% 65%
Household Income $159,121 $52,607
English as a first language 79% 38%
Jewish ethnicity 71% 10%
University degree obtained 60% 35%
I designed this research project to explore the practices and perspectives of the Baywoods parents as the dominant members of the school community. After a pilot interview with a Baywoods parent whom I knew, I recruited the rest through flyers posted in the neigh‐
bourhood and through snowball sampling in which I asked early parti‐
cipants for additional contacts. After our initial contact, my research assistant, Jessica Ringrose, and I interviewed everyone who was avail‐
able and who consented to an interview. We concluded the data collec‐
tion after some remarks became noticeably repetitive indicating satura‐
tion of themes. We conducted 25 personal interviews with 26 parents;5 20 of these were members of the white, high SES, Jewish group. Interviews, about two hours in duration, were conducted in the participants’ homes.
Transcribed verbatim, the data were analyzed using HyperQual soft‐
ware. Participants’ ages ranged from 31 to 51. Sixteen of the participants had full‐time occupations: four in business, four in healthcare, three in education, two in childcare, one in clerical work, one in social services, and one in the trades. Six participants had part‐time employment and three of the women were full‐time homemakers, although combinations of these occurred. The occupation of one parent was unknown. Only two of the participants were men; twenty were married, three were sepa‐
rated, two were divorced.
In my work, I assumed that the Baywoods parents were a powerful group in the school community. I explored how power operated among them, how it was expressed and secured, and how it affected and was affected by the changes that had taken place at the school. I learned about their responses to the developments at Pinecrest, theorized about how they conceptualized or problematized the changing character of the school, and traced the tensions that might exist in their responses. Data were collected on their observations of the school, their evaluation of its programs, their involvement with school activities, their school choice, and their views on their children’s needs. I also asked them to describe problems they observed at the school regarding the staff, students, or interactions between groups.
The 25 interview participants had 58 children among them and of these, all but three attended Pinecrest for their elementary years at some time between 1985 and 2001. Two of the three children who never attended Pinecrest attended another public elementary school nearby and one had been sent to a Jewish day school. Of the 55 children at Pine‐
crest, four attended elite private schools for at least some of their elementary grades, one moved to Pinecrest from a Jewish day school,
and two more had applied to elite private elementary schools but were not admitted. Two had been switched from other public elementary schools. One child had attended three different schools by grade 6: one elite private school and two different public schools; a few others had moved between various private schools and the public system between intermediate levels and secondary school (grades 9 to 13, now to grade 12).
What proportion of my interview participants chose to leave Pinecrest? Although a small minority, 4 of the 58 children had actually attended some kind of private school at the elementary level, two more had applied but were not accepted as noted above. This number in‐
creases if I count the 14 children from the eight families who said that they would have chosen private schools in hindsight or if they could have afforded to do so for one or more of their children. Finally, four children left Pinecrest for another public elementary school. Therefore, of the 58 children who were entitled to attend Pinecrest as their neighbourhood school, 41 per cent did not or would not have attended given their par‐
ents’ preferences. In contrast, 7 families of the 24 in total (29%) said resolutely that they would not consider private school for their children.
Of the 25 participants, I would count 8 as critics of Pinecrest since its
“sudden multiculturalism,” 10 as supporters, and 7 as ambivalent. Ex‐
ploring these positions inspires possible explanations of the parents’
responses.
As the powerful group, the Baywoods parents preserved a sense of their morality through their distance – psychic if not physical – from their Kerrydale neighbours. And they were distant, too, from the impact of their school choices upon all the students at Pinecrest School. The parents operated within this tension: school is regarded as a community institution serving the public interest and as a quasi‐political site where public and private claims are contested. Emerging from their claims upon education as a public good, the Baywoods parents were sensitive to the value of multiculturalism in their children’s lives. Yet, emerging from their claims upon school as a private choice, the parents were anxious to “protect” their children to the neglect of the needs of other children. This tension remains unresolved for them.
THEORETICAL CONTEXT
The Practice, Relationality, and Maintenance of Middle‐Classness
I begin with a cultural perspective on middle‐classness. Distinct from questions of “who” belongs to the middle‐class (as represented by Gold‐
thorpe, 1980) or even “what” is the middle‐class (as represented by Wright, 1989), this perspective stresses the practices of the middle‐class.
The concept of cultural capital as developed by Pierre Bourdieu receives special attention (see Ball, 2003; Lareau, 1989; Savage, 2000; Skeggs, 2004). In its “objectified” state, Bourdieu (1986) explains that cultural capital is the acquisition of those cultural goods valued as the “distinc‐
tion” of the privileged class, and that these become components of one’s habitus, durable systems of attitudes and dispositions that develop through history and generate practices. Class is not understood in the abstract. Nor is it a static or discrete category. It is approached instead in terms of “the situated realizations, of class and class reproduction” and
“as it happens” (Ball, 2003, pp. 6, 174) bridging a structuralist and culturalist perspective. As a structural phenomenon, class bears upon material conditions and the production and distribution of rewards and resources. As a cultural practice, class positions are achieved and enacted as lived reality.
Class is also understood relationally. That is, class becomes itself through differentiation and exclusion (see Savage, 2000) and through active identification or gestures of belonging (Ball, 2003). As Anthias (2005) points out, group membership involves the maintenance of boundaries. Defining we is premised on constructing otherness. The con‐
cepts of cultural and social capital as developed by Pierre Bourdieu are frequently used for analyzing the school choice among the middle class particularly for its relevance to studies of social inequality. As Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz (1996) note, choice is thoroughly social; it depends not just on cultural capital but on the activation of cultural capital. One must be able to choose to reap the economic, social, and symbolic bene‐
fits conferred by social class. Middle‐class parents are more likely to animate their cultural capital through a variety of means, including direct involvement with the school, the provision of supplementary educational programs, better contacts with teachers and administrators,
and efforts to achieve confluence between the school culture and that of their home (Lareau, 1989; Wells & Oakes, 1998). More generally, the act of school‐choosing itself is attached to class positions (and class posi‐
tioning). As stated by Strathern, in After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, this “demonstrates how choosing is a particularly middle‐class way of operating in the world . . .” (as cited in Skeggs, 2004). Choice is embedded in class relations, assuming its universality obscures the class location of the chooser and the inequalities of con‐
dition that make choosing more possible for a chooser.
Finally, class is subject to economic and social forces that prevent its stability. Its reproduction is not assured and people are actively engaged in maintaining themselves in their classed location. Indeed, class is highlighted in times of crisis when the issue of its reproduction is in question. This dynamic is of particular relevance in discussions of schooling. Parents invest their children with class and their desire to maintain class. Ball (2003) explains that “middle‐class ontologies are founded upon incompleteness, they are about becoming, about the developmental self, about making something of yourself, realizing yourself, realizing your potential” (p. 163). Parents’ decisions about schools embody that moment at which they would make their children into a classed subject. They fight to preserve their advantage against a threat posed by competition from others (Dehli, 2000).
The Practice, Relationality, and Maintenance of Whiteness
Just as oppression is seen as intersectional, the exercise of power must also be critiqued intersectionally. This observation became quite appar‐
ent when I listened to the Baywoods parents; it was not simple racism, nor ethnocentrism I heard, nor even exclusion based on social class differences. The way that these dimensions came together, presented itself as the most accurate way of describing the parents’ positions and practices. As noted, this article adapts Stasiulus’ and Anthias’ inter‐
sectional theorizing. Therefore, it is to the literature on both middle‐
classness and whiteness I turn.6 I propose that these three dimensions of middle‐classness – practice, relationality, and maintenance – may also be applied to an analysis of whiteness. Critical whiteness studies refer to the emerging corpus of writing that takes white racialization and the exer‐
cise of domination and privilege as its departure point in anti‐racism.7 Whiteness has a dual, even paradoxical meaning. On the one hand, it confers meaning upon the white body demarcated through geography (the West) and history (imperialism). On the other hand, its evocation in critical whiteness studies theorizes the replacement of white racialization as objective fact with white racialization as a process of domination in social relations. An effective way to negotiate this dualism is to focus not on who is “white” or what is “whiteness,” but how whiteness works.
Several contributors to critical whiteness studies have described mechanisms through which power is practised among whites. Hurtado and Stewart (2004), for example, describe such dynamics as the creation of social distance from others’ difficult circumstances, the denial of per‐
sonal circumstances conferring racial privilege, white racial privilege acknowledged only with its loss, superiority ascribed to a “normalcy”
and “neutrality” unattainable by racialized others, and an unrecognized solidarity. Gabriel (1998) specifies in whiteness the processes of exnom‐
ination (refusing to name itself), naturalization (against whom others require definition), and universalization (taking its peculiarity as repre‐
sentative of all). Frankenberg (1993) asserts that whiteness operates as a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.
The second dimension, relationality, is a salient theme in the litera‐
ture on whiteness. In critical whiteness studies generally, racism involves participation in systems of domination, the rewards for which are dis‐
tributed inequitably among groups constructed as racially different.
Benefits accrue to those groups who occupy a social location of power or who engage in the performance of power. As Toni Morrison (1993) points out in her extraordinary statement, qualities attributed to white‐
ness are possible only in relation to their absence in a racialized other.
White privilege, a normalized identity, status, rewards, and dominance are contingent upon an epistemological frame that situates others as dif‐
ferent relative to these characteristics. Critical whiteness studies expose the often unacknowledged but mutual contingencies of privilege and oppresssion.
Lastly, middle‐classness and whiteness intersect at the market in a way that has particular implications for the maintenance of middle‐class boundaries (Dehli, 2000; Whitty, 2001b). This begs the question of the
relationship between whiteness and social class. In the paragraphs above, I have framed whiteness as a practice of domination and a con‐
solidation of privilege in relation with disadvantage. However, nothing in that frame determines an intersection with middle‐classness unless Stasiulus’ (1999) approach to intersectionality joins that of Anthias’
(2005) who sees “ethnicity, gender and class, first, as crosscutting and mutually reinforcing systems of domination and subordination . . . sec‐
ondly, ethnicity, gender and class may construct multiple, uneven and contradictory social patterns of domination and subordination . . . .” (pp.
36‐37 [original emphasis]). Middle‐classness and whiteness so clearly reinforce each other that they are usually conflated in the literature on school choice. With their link to Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of cultural cap‐
ital, researchers in the UK and USA write almost exclusively about the choices of white, middle‐class parents in relation to others marked by difference in both these respects (see Ball, 2003; Brantlinger, 2003).
Lareau and Horvat (1999) include whiteness as an element in cultural capital providing advantages to middle‐class parents; Gillborn (2005) discusses UK education reforms toward privatization as an act of white supremacy. The link between class and whiteness in school choice is reflected in cultural approaches to class and whiteness more generally.
In the social history of European immigrants, the advantages of white‐
ness were conferred through entry into the middle‐class (Roediger, 1991).
School Choice and Neo‐Liberalism
To return to the question of how middle‐class parents struggle to maintain their whiteness, school choice turns out to be a particularly good illustration. Because the discourse of economic orthodoxy and political neo‐liberalism permeates institutional life, the school becomes another product for sale in the marketplace. For Ball (2003), such reforms (“financial and organizational . . . and symbolic”) facilitate “a reorient‐
ation of the education system as a whole to the needs, concerns and interests of middle‐class parents. They work to embed class thinking into the policies of schools” (p. 49). Whitty (2001a) concurs: “Much of my own work . . . has demonstrated empirically that education reforms couched in the rhetoric of choice, difference and diversity often turn out
to be sophisticated ways of reproducing existing hierarchies of class and race” (p. 289). Parents’ practice of middle‐class whiteness erects a differ‐
entiation between us and them in which schools are evaluated and com‐
pared. Because the individualism and competitiveness of the market stimulates the desire of middle‐class parents to secure a future for their children in unpredictable conditions (Brown, 1997), whiteness converges with middle‐classness to bring about ultimate advantage. These relation‐
ships structure the presentation of the data that follows. The practice of class and whiteness may be linked to the exclusion of difference; rela‐
tionality corresponds to the question of school quality; and the theme of maintenance emerges in the parents’ management of school choice and competition.
THE PRACTICE OF CLASS AND WHITENESS: THE EXCLUSION OF DIFFERENCE
In the literature discussed above, middle‐classness is constituted as prac‐
tice and accomplished through both material and symbolic means. A manifestation of their performance of class and whiteness is the Bay‐
woods parents’ construction of social difference. The invention of boundaries around our children and theirs enables these parents to claim distinct qualities and needs. They evaluate the educational services avail‐
able at Pinecrest in terms of their children’s individualities and assess the correspondence between individual requirement and the services offer‐
ed. However, they do not make assessments on the basis of the school’s manifest content. Parents observe the social environment for its pros‐
pects for (or threats to) their child’s ostensible needs. The culture of the school – significantly in the makeup of the children there – is at least as important if not more important than public measures of achieve‐ment.
The difference represented by the Kerrydale children – despite its enor‐
mous diversity – is problematic for some participants and valued by others. Among the latter, the interactions with the students from Kerry‐
dale carry social benefits for their children. Helen,8 a critic of Pinecrest, values multiculturalism in elementary school because it exposes her children to realities of urban life (presumably centred around race and ethnic diversity) rather than postponing the experience until university.
Multiculturalism becomes something of a learning opportunity. Anne
says that she “just thought it was, like, good for my kids to see that not everybody can speak English.” She continues, “I think, like, eyes just open up. And, yeah, there’s kids that have come from, like, war‐torn countries and look how they’re doing in school and that’s great and they’re part of a community – I say it’s great. I think it’s great for every‐
body to see that. And be a part of it.” Anne evinces here a stereotype of the battered refugee. The children from Kerrydale thus provide her children with a lesson in global perspectives. Despite these speakers’
benevolence, their practice of middle‐classness and whiteness produces a social distance and neutrality. Hearing others’ oppression takes on a heuristic value. Commodified to satisfy a white, middle‐class desire, their identity is maintained through a consumption of the difference they attribute to the Kerrydale children. It has become a means by which their children can improve themselves and thus acquire the (multi)cultural capital required for success in today’s world.
The increase in the school’s ethnic diversity was identified speci‐
fically and unequivocally by eight of the participants (Heidi, Sharon, Gail, Helen, Barb, Fern, Tracy, Miriam). Here are two relevant interview excerpts. The first is Fern for whom the Kerrydale students represent an absolute difference. Her position represents the far end of the spectrum.
During the interviews, some of my participants expressed self‐conscious‐
ness about making remarks that would “sound racist.” At least two par‐
ticipants requested that we turn off the tape recorder so their explicitly racist remarks would not be recorded. The richest of the interview excerpts on the meaning of difference constructs, by turns, a child with abject ignorance of Western education, disruptive in behaviour, neg‐
lected at home, and traumatized by the refugee experience.
So the teacher was dealing with not just children from a different culture—like, if you came from France or something—she was dealing with someone who has never even been exposed to books before. And so, they’re light years behind children that have been to kindergarten and junior kindergarten and all that kind of stuff. And that’s very hard for a teacher. I mean, they, you know, she’s dealing with kids at that level and there’s several behavioural problems. (Fern)
I mean, I don’t want my kid to associate with kids whose parents don’t care whether their kids do well at school, who don’t care about whether [she] is, you
know, filthy dirty. You know? So, if it turns out that there’s a school where—I know this sounds like so awful – but anyhow, you know, if parents sort of per‐
ceive that these new Canadians are careless about their kids or are—and I don’t know that that’s necessarily so – but if that’s the perception that the majority of the kids – and it’s 51 per cent [ESL] now – so, if a lot of those kids are coming from homes where the parents have maybe been so traumatized because of escaping from wherever they were that they don’t have – they’re so busy trying to make a living here that their kids are kind of neglected in some way or whatever – that’s not a common, a common, that’s not a common thing for my kids to – that’s not a common experience. (Barb)
In the first excerpt above, Fern claims that the children from Kerry‐
dale are markedly behind, even backward in their adaptation to life at Pinecrest. Their deficits begin, she asserts, from their earliest years and their cumulative effects are detrimental for her children who have more than adequate preparation for the demands of elementary school. This situation together with the children’s “behavioural” problems leads Fern to conclude that such classrooms are inappropriate for children like hers because, among other things, teachers cannot cope with the diverse needs. Next, Barb links defilement and neglect with the “other” embod‐
ied in the Kerrydale children and their families. Note her self‐doubt and her privileging of perception over knowledge. This notwithstanding, she places her beliefs in a context. The problems derive from the families’
violent refugee past and current dire straits as they struggle to get by in the city. These conditions, for Barb, are simply more than she can tolerate. For these mothers, the practice of middle‐class whiteness reveals what Gabriel (1998) calls naturalization of social location and personal circumstances. Further, the superior status embedded in these parents’
remarks is given meaning through their reflection in the Kerrydale families. Finally, in their rejection of difference, these mothers attempt to strictly control the social interactions of their child‐ren. Theirs is a frantic gesture to maintain their white, middle‐class identities in the face of a threat.
In this study, there were parents who appreciate Pinecrest for its cultural diversity and those who object to it. There were parents like Diane, Melinda, and Anne who regarded the Kerrydale children as different but positive nonetheless for the learning opportunities they
could provide their children. These parents supported Pinecrest as inclusionary. Then, parents like Fern, Barb, and Wendy preferred the school to be exclusionary and have, in some cases, removed their child‐
ren from it. Between these two positions lies another. Some of the par‐
ents placed limits on the amount of diversity they would accept. That is, they presented the desire for balance as a benign, even optimal com‐
promise. Yet their desire for control over the process indicates their insistence on shaping the school environment in ways conducive to their values. Tracy admitted to feeling like “[a] minority here . . . like, inun‐
dated with immigrants . . . . I think we should give them a chance. But I would like to see a little bit more of a balance. That’s all.” The preference for balance registers a preference for exclusion. The following excerpt is illustrative. Note Tracy’s downward shift from 80 per cent to 70 per cent as an acceptable level of immigrants in the classroom and her survey of her daughter’s happiness as contingent upon the degree of diversity there.
It bothers me to a certain extent but not enough that I would pull my child out of Pinecrest. Because she has lots of – when you look in your [School Year] Book, you’ll see she has lots of friends who are Canadian and she’s fine. As long as she gets that balance – as long as it’s not 80 per cent of immigrants, then I’m happy . . . . I don’t want her in a class with 70 per cent of immigrants. (Tracy)
The fragility of class boundaries is shown here. The middle‐class parents leaned heavily upon their own members to remind themselves of where they stood and against whom they stood. The middle class knows itself in relation to what it strives not to be. Parents who might have taken middle‐class homogeneity for granted were able to name it once they faced the alternative. Thus the school is a venue for the learning white, middle‐class identities (Byrne, 2006). To get that lesson right, these parents vigilantly ensured the optimal amount of exposure to cul‐
tural diversity. Although exposure is good in principle, the risk is over‐
exposure. Parents expressed their desire to set the terms of achieving the best “mix” as they practised their class (and race) position. Academic standards, security, and stability become the spoken features of the school. Race and class persisted as the unspoken features.
THE RELATIONALITY OF CLASS AND WHITENESS: THE QUESTION OF SCHOOL QUALITY
The most conspicuous instance of the power among the Baywoods par‐
ents is manifest in the problem of the quality of education. Other researchers (e.g., Brantlinger, 2003) identify this theme as well and because it avoids the socially unacceptable language of social difference, it is often analyzed as a code for exclusion (Holme, 2002). In my study, supporters and detractors alike identified this reason as key to explain why parents wanted to remove their children from Pinecrest. With the entrance of students from Kerrydale, Baywoods parents expressed their concerns in terms of the educational impact on their children. Coded as
“getting ahead” through enriched educational programs or as a desire to maintain a “higher level” of education than that perceived to be available at Pinecrest, problems appear to be indisputable and consensual. The following interview excerpts are evocative.
When you have kids that are not intelligent (laughs) or not as coming from families where education is not a priority. It’s a cultural thing. Education to a great extent – education is a cultural thing. . . . You’ve got all these immigrant kids coming into the school – which is turning the school more into, like, an inner‐city school. Which right away, in our minds, makes us think that the quality of the education’s not gonna be the same. You don’t have the same calibre of kids in the classroom. You know, you want your kids to be in a class where they’re being challenged. How can they be challenged when [for] three quarters of the kids in the class, English is a second language? (Miriam)
I know the majority of the group of friends that I knew. . . . We always talked about what the change was in the school at Pinecrest. How sorry we were to see that the school had gone in this direction, whether we were gonna continue to send our children to this area; what the level of education and instruction and what the problems were. Administratively and socially and academically.
(Sharon)
For both Miriam and Sharon, the boundary separating us from them was rigid. Miriam conflated the difference embodied by Kerrydale fam‐
ilies with a lack of intelligence and academic ambition. Sharon lamented the loss of the Pinecrest she knew as a child. In this, she evokes solidarity
with peers because she attributed a range of problems to the children at Pinecrest who represented an undesirable change in the school culture.
Given a choice among the group so strictly circumscribed by these two mothers, what parent would opt for such a school? The commitment they have in erecting this rigid difference reflects their rejection of the school and justifies their fierce insistence that doing so is in the best interests of their children. The new marketplace of schools provides an appealing array of alternatives in which avoidance of undesirable child‐
ren can be assured. The raced and classed identities of Miriam’s and Sharon’s children are more likely to be maintained when such choices are considered.
The question of school quality is not restricted to Pinecrest critics like Miriam and Sharon. Even supporters of the school like Gail, Elaine, and Anne suggested that the demands of Kerrydale students diminished teachers’ ability to respond to those students from Baywoods who had a higher level of skill. In the following quotation, Gail explained this predicament, but by associating the Kerrydale children with a plethora of problems. For Gail, the risk was her children’s exclusion from the teacher’s attention because they were simply unlikely to require as much of her time. Rhonda stated this position more forcefully; she, Heidi, and Barb made the same point, but from their critical perspective. The consequence of a teacher’s distribution of her attention in such class‐
rooms was, for these parents, a neglect of the more academically capable children like theirs. The particular status and privilege of white, middle‐
classness is like precious cargo on a ship threatened with hijacking. To preserve its integrity, these parents sought the utmost in its care. The safest bet is, of course, away from Pinecrest to a safer place where such considerations are obviated through self‐selection of passengers.
For the classroom teacher, especially when you have a school where the program is inclusionary, you have a teacher dealing with kids whose English is not their first language and they have learning disabilities and they have emotional pro‐
blems, behavioural problems. There’s a lot for that teacher to cope with and I think that the kid that’s just sort of sailing along, sort of doesn’t get the attention.
(Gail)
[The teacher] was stretched to the limit and she had three to five ESL kids in her class who were only taken out an hour or two a day. So, that’s where I do agree with the parents. That you’re asking the classroom teacher to be all things to all people and you’re not providing the resources for her to do that. And is the higher level child gonna pay a price for that. Is the quality of education gonna decline? Yes. (Rhonda)
[F]rankly because of the make‐up of the Pinecrest now with so many children coming from lower class area (sic). You know, from outside . . . they do have many more, like I said, ethnicities and I think it does – I’m not saying these children aren’t smart because you know, they can be smart as well. But it just slows down a classroom. (Heidi)
[B]oth my kids were very bright and I don’t feel they are challenged enough by all the teachers. . . . I wanted something extra for my kids. . . . And they were motivated to learn and so it would have been nice had the teachers been able to provide some enrichment. You know, either make their projects a little bit more interesting or complicated or expect more. (Barb)
Barb expected that Pinecrest teachers have lower expectations of the other students to whom they assigned less interesting projects. Her eval‐
uation of her own children as smart, dovetails with some of the other parents’ demands for enriched learning for their gifted children. (Yet her expectations were misplaced: When her son was assessed for gifted programming, Barb reported that “what they said was that in fact he wasn’t quite as brilliant as I thought.”) Several of the Baywoods parents believed that their children qualify as gifted students. Of the 58 children among the interviewed participants, 10 (17%) were either attending pro‐
grams for gifted students or had been tested for this qualification. One was in an International Baccalaureate (IB) program at a public school.
Yet provisions for their capable children were, according to these par‐
ents, precisely where Pinecrest fell short. Holme (2002) discusses parallel findings in her group of 42 parents engaged in school choice.
[M]ost of these parents believed that their children were in some sense gifted
and needed an academic environment with other high‐achieving kids in order to be stimulated. By equating children of color with low academic achievement, these parents are able to express their concerns about diversity not in terms of
racial or class prejudice, but in terms of concerns about the academic and social needs of their own children. (p. 195)
Similar dynamics are at work among the Baywoods parents.
I have described some participants’ concerns about deteriorating quality of education, insufficient teaching to their academically strong children, and the teachers’ preoccupation with ESOL (English for Speak‐
ers of Other Languages) students and students with behavioural prob‐
lems. Yet supporters of the school did not share these concerns. An example of a Baywoods parent who questioned the deterioration of edu‐
cational standards for their children is Diane. On the one hand, she ob‐
served that “the immigrant population moving into the school has moved the Jewish population out.” Yet, she rejected the assumption of deteriorating quality of the school as demonstrated by the school board’s published report of province‐wide testing in grades 3 and 6. She said that she had neither proof nor knowledge of worsening conditions. She also rejected the assumption that teaching in a classroom with ESOL stu‐
dents necessarily held back the others.
When we started in kindergarten and I looked at the grouping in my kid’s class – my son, it would have been – now, I think he had maybe five Jewish kids within that class. And there were definitely children of obvious colour and different background[s]. A number of kids where English was a second language. I spoke to the kindergarten teacher and. . . . I asked her if it was ever a problem for her and she told me right up front that generally the children who came in without English before Christmas were already caught up in the classroom. And after that she didn’t need the resource teacher anymore. They were able to function with the rest of the kids. And that she often found that the immigrant popu‐
lation’s children worked a lot harder to catch up than the [Baywoods] children.
So, to me, that was good enough. I didn’t have any worries and it’s been that way through the rest of my kids’ education at Pinecrest. (Diane )
Hal’s experiences are similar. When asked whether ESOL disrupts the classroom at all, he responded:
No, no, it doesn’t. It doesn’t because, as far as my kids – like, in [daughter’s]
class, there were very few that needed the ESL. Very few. And the teacher just went on. You know, it’s amazing. She just went on and would go to them
individually at times and then – and she even had, like, the kids, help them.
Which is great. So, it wasn’t really a problem. No.” (Hal)
Parents like Rhonda and Barb expressed specific concerns that Pine‐
crest was inattentive to their children’s superior academic needs. Yet when Heidi sent all three of her children to private schools, she discov‐
ered that Pinecrest had prepared them adequately for the presumably greater demands and that “none of them suffered at all.” Used as a barometer for the quality of education at Pinecrest, Heidi demonstrated to herself that her fear about Pinecrest was unfounded. Ruth provided evidence that the quality of education at Pinecrest was more than ade‐
quate: after completing grade 6, her son successfully passed an inter‐
national entrance exam for an elite private school in the city.
For some of these parents, the anxiety of ensuring that their children get ahead may dissipate only after their children move on to the next level of schooling and prove that their education at Pinecrest was adequate. Through their school choice and the maintenance of their children’s positioning in the school marketplace, they realized that edu‐
cational quality at Pinecrest was not jeopardized after all. Whether this lesson translated to a defeat of related fears is uncertain. The Baywoods parents may be wondering about the risk of reproducing their class position and their whiteness. How can they be sure that their children will seize a future through whatever educational resources are available?
There is no certainty, hence the anxiety of playing the school market. A parent must do whatever she or he can to shape favourable conditions for winning. The themes of distance and of maintenance of boundaries – psychic and ideational – persist here. They are expressed in words con‐
sistent with middle‐class parenting: there is equal opportunity to com‐
pete for school qualifications in a non‐discriminatory marketplace pat‐
ronized by individualistic consumers.
THE MAINTENANCE OF CLASS AND WHITENESS: SCHOOL CHOICE AND COMPETITION
Middle‐classness and whiteness are maintained to effect advantage or security in otherwise insecure conditions. The public school, an effective site in which to observe such activity, is sensitive to the state’s growing
accommodation to markets and the shifting of responsibility for public goods to individuals and families. White, middle‐class parents’ preoc‐
cupation with securing their children’s future through the right educ‐
ation converges with the commodification of education in the form of a proliferation of private school options, private tutoring businesses, char‐
ter schools, standardized testing, tax credits for private school attend‐
ance, and the state’s campaign to position schools as the place to form young citizens prepared to compete (and win) in the global marketplace.
These sentiments – and the anxiety they precipitate – are expressed well here by Miriam whose observations are remarkably self‐reflective and anxious.
And it’s not good enough to just get a mediocre education today. It’s just not good enough. It’s such a competitive world and you want to give your kids the best shot. And that’s why we’re – we as young parents today, we’re struggling because – to the point where I think we overdo it, because we don’t know what to do. It’s not enough! You know, we don’t know [how] to do enough for our kids. We want to expose them to everything and we’re afraid that if we don’t ex‐
pose them to everything, they’re just not gonna survive. . . . It’s almost a com‐
petition – you know, who can, who can give their kids the most; who can put them in the most activities; who can put them in the best schools. The more you pay, the better the school. It’s a big friggin rat race. And these kids are all becoming part of it. . . . (Miriam)
As positions of educational advantage are squeezed and the bond between educational credentials and good jobs erodes, these parents struggled to maintain their children’s security. The outcome of the par‐
ents’ anxious deliberations is a reproduction of whiteness and middle‐
classness. Accomplished through the practice of race and class, the par‐
ents’ remarks made no mention of either factor. Naturalization, distan‐
cing, evasiveness, and neutrality are all instantiated here. Through insist‐
ing on the difference of the Kerrydale children and the entitlement of the Baywoods’ children, rewards for the latter are rendered.
A consequence of these dynamics is the manufacture of social dis‐
tance between the Baywoods and Kerrydale groups. The Baywoods par‐
ents’ personal experiences with children from Kerrydale were limited to casual interactions with some of their children’s friends. There was
